Sir Philip Green? It’s MPs who should be ashamed
This man has always sweated spivviness from every oily pore
It’s always such a pleasure to see a group of MPs actually doing their job, isn’t it? As opposed to just talking about doing their job, as seems to have been the case since the EU referendum, all the way back in June. I mean, since voting for Brexit, we have barely been able to move for politicians not doing what they’re supposed to be doing: they’re either quitting their jobs, or trying to get other MPs to quit their jobs, or going to lots of meetings where they talk about maybe, perhaps doing their jobs (though only then in a “hard” way or a “soft” way). Then again, perhaps this is precisely what MPs have always done, or not done, since the dawn of time.
Anyway, it was a joy this week to see politicians roll up their sleeves and actually get stuck in – mostly to Sir Philip Green, though, of course, we now know that his title is about to be dropped faster than the anchor of a £100 million superyacht in the Med in August.
In extraordinary scenes in the Commons on Thursday, not a single MP disagreed with the motion to strip the former BHS owner of his knighthood. In the words of Labour MP Iain Wright, Sir Philip – or should we just call him Phil? – “took the rings from BHS’s fingers, beat it black and blue, starved it of food and water, put it on life support … and then wanted credit for keeping it alive”.
David Winnick, another Labour MP, described Phil as a “billionaire spiv”. A spivillionaire, if you will.
Yet neither Winnick nor Wright, who were both in Parliament when the oily businessman was handed his gong by Tony Blair, seem to have objected at that time. They might well argue that, back in 2006, spivillionaire Green was just a plain old billionaire doing wonders for the UK high street.
Perhaps they didn’t recognise the ridiculousness of a Labour government handing out honours to a man whose business once paid a £1.2 billion dividend to his wife, the Monaco-based Lady Green, depriving the Treasury of an estimated £285 million in tax.
Perhaps they hadn’t read the transcripts of an angry conversation between Green and a reporter who had invited an auditor to check whether BHS was actually worth £1 billion as Green claimed. The exchange was published in a newspaper in 2003, long before the “asset stripper” – as Green was described by Labour’s Frank Field this week – sold his chain of department stores to a serial bankrupt for a quid. Phil called the Guardian journalist a word ending in “-unt” that isn’t “aunt”. He also did this to a colleague of mine a decade ago, when she dared run an innocuous diary story about the Greens. Even my hard-nosed friend was shocked and shaken by his volley of verbal abuse.
The point is, Green has long been known as a rich tyrant and a bully. It’s not as if the MPs who showed up to do their jobs this week would have been unaware of his reputation. It’s not as if this couldn’t have been foreseen. For this is a man who has always sweated spivviness from every pore of his tanned, reptilian skin, a man of such arrogance that, even in the face of universal condemnation, he asks for our sympathy over the miserable summer that he has spent wobbling his champagne gut around one of his two superyachts. Excuse my un-PC language, but you would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to have not seen this one coming.
I find Green’s behaviour appalling, but the sight of politicians delighting in his downfall makes me feel just as green around the gills. Call me cynical, but it’s almost as if they are using the prospect of 22,000 voters facing huge cuts to BHS pensions as an opportunity to cover themselves in glory.
But what does removing his knighthood really do? Does it go any way to even slightly reducing the £571 million pension deficit left by plundering Philip Green (as he shall now be known)? How can any member of the Labour Party accuse David Cameron of cronyism, as happened this summer, when it was one of their own leaders who made a knight of one of the most unchivalrous men ever to have walked the earth?
If this lot had been doing their jobs properly, Philip Green would never have become a Sir in the first place, and this sorry mess might not have happened at all.